Open-source evangelist

Most young graduates expect that when they enter the job market, they will be able to find positions in the field they've spent four years studying. Ben Henshall was one of them.

Armed with a freshly minted degree in information technology, the native of Western Australia interviewed for a tech position but didn't get it. Instead he took a detour into sales and marketing, which has turned out to be a very fulfilling journey.

Two decades after that initial change in career direction, he leads the Southeast Asian operations of Red Hat, the open-source software multinational that has been going from strength to strength in recent years.

Sandboxes work best when they're open

Open source is ideal to use in sandbox environments and experimentation, often leap-frogging existing legacy technology stacks. Its wide acceptance and growing ease of use helps firms to drive strategic decision-making and deliver their operational goals.

Oracle’s Open-Source Battle Is a ‘Big’ Red Flag for Shareholders

The company has spent the 21st century fighting open source, the idea that software should be a shared endeavor whose benefits go mainly to customers. This made it late to the cloud, the most profitable trend of the last decade, because the cloud is based on open-source software.

Now Oracle stands on the brink of a great victory, the breaking of open-source tech in court. In Oracle vs. Google, to be heard March 24, it will tell the Supreme Court that instructions on using software, called application program interfaces (APIs), can be as protected by copyright as software itself. In effect it’s saying open-source licenses can be rendered moot by corporate fiat.

It’s likely to win the argument. President Donald Trump’s administration supports it, thanks in part to generous political contributions from Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison.

Open Hardware Monitor 0.9.2

The Open Hardware Monitor is a free open source software that monitors temperature sensors, fan speeds, voltages, load and clock speeds of a computer.

PeaZip 7.1.1

PeaZip is an open source file and archive manager. It's freeware and free of charge for any use. PeaZip can extract most of archive formats both from Windows and Unix worlds, ranging from mainstream 7Z, RAR, TAR and ZIP to experimental ones like PAQ/LPAQ family, currently the most powerful compressor available.

Open-source software analyzes economics of biofuels, bioproducts

Perennial grasses can be converted into everything from ethanol to bioplastics, but it's unclear which bioproducts hold the greatest potential.

BioSTEAM, a new open-source simulation software package in Python developed by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, gives scientists, engineers, biotechnology companies, and funding agencies a fast, flexible tool to analyze the economics of producing different biofuels and bioproducts—in a matter of seconds.

BioSTEAM—Biorefinery Simulation and Techno-Economic Analysis Modules—allows researchers to quickly compare and prioritize strategies for converting biomass to fuels and products. It also generates data that can be used to evaluate the environmental impact of biorefineries, including greenhouse gas emissions, paving the way for a sustainable bioeconomy.

The project by lead developer Yoel Cortes-Pena, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and his advisor, Associate Professor Jeremy Guest, was published in the latest issue of ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering. Both researchers are part of the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI), a U.S. Department of Energy-funded Bioenergy Research Center.

Audio: Shah Selbe on how open source technology is creating new opportunities for conservation

On today’s episode of the Mongabay Newscast, we speak with Shah Selbe, an engineer and technologist who founded Conservify, a conservation tech lab that uses open-source technologies to empower local communities and solve some of the most pressing conservation challenges of our time.

Open source tool fun way to help remind people to wash hands

Push the button for the hand sanitizer, watch a virus get squashed. Jonathan Muma reports that a new audio/visual reminder to help people wash their hands could be coming to a city near you.

Open Networking Foundation launches Aether platform for 5G edge cloud as a service

The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) has announced the introduction of Aether, the first open source platform to deliver Enterprise 5G/LTE edge cloud as a service.

The platform offers mobile connectivity and edge cloud services for distributed enterprise networks, all provisioned and managed from a centralised cloud. According to ONF, Aether is easy to deploy, highly scalable and is designed for rapid edge service onboarding in multi-cloud environment. The platform also removes the costs and complexities of deploying private mobile networks, making available the power of advanced 4G/5G networking to all enterprises.

The project has been backed, as with other ONF projects, by the foundation’s operator partners, including AT&T, China Unicom, and Deutsche Telekom. Jochen Appel, VP fixed and mobile platforms at Deutsche Telekom, said that the company was ‘eagerly looking forward’ to the project, and that Aether was ‘yet another example where ONF has demonstrated the power to rapidly build new solutions by building on top of existing open source platforms.’

ONF's Stratum open switch OS available on TIP's Cassini open hardware

The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) announced its Stratum open source switch operating system (OS) software is now available on Cassini optical transport hardware from the Telecom Infra Project (TIP). The ONF said it is the first open source operating system for Cassini, which is a network switching platform with integrated optical transponders.

Stratum is part of ONF's Unified, Programmable and Automated Network (UPAN) Exemplar Platform, which is working on the next generation of SDN for ONF's membership. Stratum is a silicon-independent switch operating system for software-defined networks that runs on a variety of switching silicon and various white box switch platforms.

KITE code could power new quantum developments

A research collaboration led by the University of York's Department of Physics has created open-source software to assist in the creation of quantum materials which could in turn vastly increase the world's computing power.

Throughout the world the increased use of data centres and cloud computing are consuming growing amounts of energy - quantum materials could help tackle this problem, say the researchers.

Quantum materials - materials which exploit unconventional quantum effects arising from the collective behaviour of electrons - could perform tasks previously thought impossible, such as harvesting energy from the complete solar spectrum or processing vast amounts of data with low heat dissipation.

Purdue University Launches Open Source, All-in-One Network Forensics Toolkit